“We’re looking to set up our Facebook Page, but we don’t want to let people post comments about us because we are afraid of what they might say.”

Many companies operating in traditional industries have been slow to embrace social media platforms. One of the reasons mentioned is not being able to control what is said about a company, its products or services. But as more and more companies develop social media presences the pressure is growing on those left behind to overcome their fear and realise that social networking is changing the way in which companies do business, communicate their message and engage with consumers. And if anyone wants to say something negative about you isn’t it best to have it in a place where you can see it and address the issue. Read more >>

Your Social Media networking Return on Investment (ROI) is directly related to either the money you spend in digital marketing, or the time and effort you spend in creating and building strong profiles on whatever social media channels you deem effective. Remember that some businesses will benefit more from spending additional effort on “niche” networks that may have less traffic, but are more targeted to your ultimate consumer.

In the past week we have all heard about Brian Cowen on RTE Radio One’s Morning Ireland this morning. The Taoiseach was on the show at 8.50am to discuss the country’s financial woes and the feedback from the Fianna Fáil party think-in which in Galway.

If you own a business, you have many choices to promote your business. Social Media Marketing (SMM) is an online marketing strategy that will work with just about any type of business. You can use a social media marketing campaign to strengthen and support your other marketing campaigns.

What are the main differences between facebook fan pages and group pages?

The 2 major differences include:

Unlike groups, fan pages are visible to unregistered people and are thus indexed (important for reputaion management, for example);

Unlike pages, groups allow to send out “bulk invite” (you can easily invite all your friends to join the group while with pages you will be forced to drop some invites manually). Groups are thus better for viral marketing, meaning that any group member can also send bulk invites to the friends of his.

I was invited to write the annotated bibliography on social network sites, privacy and surveillance for the upcoming Cybersurveillance and Everyday Life workshop at the University of Toronto, and they’ve kindly allowed me to share it here. I’ve also included, below, some other resources I’ve found useful for general social network research.

Candytech, a Czech company that helps companies create and measure Facebook marketing campaigns, has gathered a wealth of Facebook-specific data over the years via its statistics portal SocialBakers.

The company has put together this great infographic, offering an overview of Facebook’s growth and population throughout 2010. Some key stats:

- Facebook ballooned from 337 million to 585 million users in 2010 – That means roughly 7.9 new users signed up every second of the year, on average – USA and the UK are in the top 3 countries, but Indonesia is second with 32.1 million users – The top 10 countries make up nearly 60% of all users – The large majority of users is between 18 and 34 years old – … but the fastest growing age group is 65+ (+124%) – Three food brands (Coca-Cola, Starbucks and Oreo) make up the top 3 brands on Facebook – Michael Jackson may have passed away, but his legacy is strong: 26.2 million fans